Big (Storage) Changes for OneDrive for Business

Microsoft announced today that it has increased the amount of storage that each user of OneDrive for Business gets from 25 GB to 1 TB. Furthermore, all Office 365 ProPlus customers will get 1TB of OneDrive for Business storage per user as part of their subscription.

OneDrive for Business is basically the business version of OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) for consumers in that it provides subscribers with a certain amount of cloud-based storage on a per-user basis. But OneDrive for Business is based on robust, secure and manageable SharePoint technology. It comes with all of the business-oriented versions of Office 365, including now Office 365 ProPlus, which previously only provided subscription-based access to the the Office 2013 applications.

"We believe Microsoft offers the most complete solution for businesses looking to maximize their employees' ability to create, collaborate, analyze and act – and sharing, storing and syncing are foundational to that," Microsoft's John Case writes in a post to the Office News Blog. "OneDrive for Business is unique because it offers the flexibility of a reliable and secure standalone service, but is also a tightly integrated Office 365 service, offering enterprise-class productivity."

So three things are changing this week:

OneDrive for Business storage jumps from 25 GB to 1 TB. The announcement isn't clear, so I asked Microsoft and have confirmed that this is for all Office 365 subscribers who get OneDrive for Business as part of their subscription (including Office 365 Small Business, for example).

Office 365 ProPlus now gets OneDrive for Business. Previously sold as a subscription-based way to obtain Office 2013 Professional Plus only, the Office 365 ProPlus subscription now gets 1 TB of OneDrive for Business storage too.

OneDrive for Business migration. Microsoft will now help firms migrate their on-premises data to OneDrive for Business. I don't see any details about that offering, but it appears to be more moral support than any sort of wizard or whatever.

Unfortunately, this does not apply to us normal non business users so google drive is still cheaper at $120/year/1000GB vs onedrives $100/year/200GB. Can't wait for onedrive's price drop and co-owner folders (dropbox shared folder functionality) then I would not need a separate app for syncing!

I checked the website for onedrive for business and it is super confusing. It says stuff like needing sharepoint and not for personal storage needs. Are files stored on the sharepoint server instead of Microsoft servers? I dont even know how you sign up for it. It says stuff like per employee costs. What I gather is this is not the product for my personal computer.

Well, yes. It's per user / per month (or annually for a discount), but you can have a company of one person (it's how I handle my freelancing at the moment).

You'll have to make your own call on whether your stuff is personal or not. But yes, the system isn't as simple as a consumer-facing solution. (That said, it's not horribly difficult either, Paul has a few articles here about using OneDrive for Business.)

I've only had a few instances where things would get stuck and need me to resolve an issue in Office Upload Center. Generally I've had a really great experience with moving a company of 20 to O365 from Google Apps. Things get improved and fixed at a rapid pace with no excuses and no hacky kludgey workarounds that my users can't remember how to do (looking at you, Google!). The final straw was Google sitting on 2013 support for so long and swearing that AppSync for Outlook would never support CTR versions of Office (which it did 6 months after we swithced).

I wonder when the help and marketing materials will report this info. It's a great additional selling point. This is the second huge storage improvement for OneDrive (7GB to 25GB to 1TB) and email box sizes also doubled to 50GB.

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